Kokichi Sugihara loves to screw up human perception. He is the master of 3D optical illusions, designing solid three-dimensional models that do impossible things. This house is his latest creation, presented a few days ago at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Sardinia, Italy.

Sugihara—a mathematics researcher and professor at Meiji University in Kawasaki, Japan—got interested into 3D optical illusions while creating a machine to turn 2D line drawings into 3D objects:

I'm a mathematician. One of the things I've been working on is a computer that can interpret bi-dimensional line drawings as solid tridimensional objects. To test this machine I scanned drawings of impossible objects, expecting that the software would say that they were impossible to make. However, sometimes the program turned these objects into real objects, and that's how I discovered that some impossible objects are not really impossible—they can actually be built as solids in three-dimensional space. It was that experience that got me into optical illusions, particularly those of 3D objects in motion.

Check the roof illusion on the video below (click on "Ir al contenido" to skip the ad). You can check the rest of Sugihara's work in the gallery and read the rest of the interview at [La Información — In Spanish]